


down in song and memory

by paperiuni



Category: Tenryu: The Dragon Cycle
Genre: Backstory, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-26
Updated: 2010-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-14 03:15:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was the first time, and it changed everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	down in song and memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AntigravityDevice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntigravityDevice/gifts).



It was the first time, and it changed everything.

They had been criss-crossing the old northern provinces, blending in small towns and scouring farming villages for news. New kingdoms had risen and were still rising from the fall of the Heaven Dragons' capital. Master Raika had once again judged their need for knowledge greater than the demand of secrecy.

Kouei relished these spells of freedom even more than her. He thrived on the road, all quick grins and easy words whenever they ran across other travellers. Fuuga let him do the talking and listened instead. There was a mire of fear in the air, had been for a score of years now. Her memories of the life before were already fading. She'd served as the Dragon's Chosen as long as she'd been alive before that.

She almost liked it better when it was just the two of them. Just the horses and the open road, and Master Raika's copper dragon familiar floating along, their lifeline back to his hidden house on Mount Tenku.

They woke when the world was still soft with mist and the dawn noises of the woods. She went through her morning exercises, breath expanding and contracting, until her chi swelled and shrank with it. At Raika's behest, she practised, the long-honed discipline gradually overcoming her lack of inherent aptitude. Something had changed within at the Earth Dragon's touch. She was supposed to have all the world's time to find out what it was.

Something caught the edge of a widening wave of her chi. She glanced around for Kouei, instinctively, and found him looking back at her. His hands had stopped in their task of carving up new kindling. They had both sensed the same thing, a second heartbeat beginning under their own.

"To the south," he said. She found her knife by her bedroll and fastened the belt while he kicked loose earth over the embers of the fire, spear already in hand. Their horses were tethered by a grassy glade, but the sense came from the denser woods.

They pelted through the forest together, moss and dirt and leaves rustling underfoot. Kouei almost threw down his spear when it tangled in a thicket. Her breath grew quick and laboured.

Fuuga had never been with child, but she wondered if this was how it felt to cradle another life inside one's own. Her blood moved to a merciless, pounding rhythm: _come, come, come to me._

Master Raika had said they would know. She hadn't dared to imagine how. She could have followed the feeling blind, through fog and darkness, unerring as an arrow's flight.

Kouei caught her elbow and narrowly held her from tumbling down the steep hillside that gaped before them. His scarf had been skewed by a grasping branch. His face was red with the strain of running, and he seemed to search her face for answers neither of them had.

"It's that way," he whispered. "You--you feel it, too, right?"

"Yes," she gasped without a hint of lip at his stating the obvious. She had to push through her own awe and astonishment to think at all.

Somewhere here, among the green blanket of summer trees, a Dragon King had come into their power. On a hope, they had found a miracle. And it was so, so soon, almost too swiftly, a riptide licking at their feet.

"Ah--so, what now?" Kouei gripped his spear tighter.

"We find them, of course," she managed. "And--and we send for Master Raika, and..."

_And we wait for the princess._

The fierce swelling of power within her had calmed to a thrum. Kouei shifted, looking for a way down the scree-covered slope. Her thoughts were flowing back into their rows, bit by piece. They could do this, somehow, together.

There was a tremendous, writhing noise of shattering wood. Fire burst into being, gouts of orange and red. The dragon uncoiled from the forest in a geyser of flame. She was ruby-bright and her mane flowed wild and tangled behind her as she sprang aloft. Her scales trapped the rising sun and threw it back in streaming crimson reflections.

"That's..." Fuuga felt the ambient heat from the magnificent creature break sweat down her back and face. Her hand sought Kouei's arm of its own accord.

"It's Ryuuka." His voice was papery and thin.

Master Raika had slipped the deep red gem of the Fire Dragon King in Ryuuka's stiffened hands, folded over her breast.

Fuuga blinked away the memory. "Is it _starting_? Are they really coming back? This fast?"

The magnitude of that made her wordless. There was supposed to be time, the turning of a dozen human ages. The Earth Dragon had dreamed this. The knowledge--the dream of the dragon she'd been infused with--was a burning dark kernel within her.

She was still staring when a great, gloaming wind seemed to crest from behind them. She dragged her eyes away from the raging Fire Dragon, fear pulling around her like a noose. A wave of rot smothered her senses.

Something else was coming.

"Fuuga!" Kouei's call had the edge of warning. His hands on her shoulders hauled her away from the exposed top of the hill, back into the shelter of the trees.

"What is it?" She looked at him wild, uncomprehending. "We have to go to her! She needs us!"

"No," he barely breathed. "We can't."

She gathered her voice to protest as a coil of darkness pierced the dawn-tinted clouds.

A black dragon tore from the sky and a shrill keening broke in her ears. Through watering eyes, she watched Kouei fold in two, desperately covering his ears, and felt the warmth of blood under her hands. Pierced eardrums. A squeezing weight around her heart.

The dragons battled in the air, beasts of myth from the lavish wall paintings that had awed her child's eye in the palace. They thrashed and raked at each other. The Fire Dragon--Ryuuka, Ryuuka, sang Fuuga's mind in anguish--spat a jet of liquid flame at the black one. With a roar that almost forced Fuuga back onto her knees, the black dragon wound his body around the shining red loops of the other's, and tore his talons down the sweep of her belly.

Ryuuka fell from the sky in a welter of fire and blood. Her death throes ripped great gouges in the burning forest, smoke welling like a mourning banner to stain the sky. The black dragon was upon her almost before she crashed to the ground.

"Kouei." Fuuga clung to his arm. She could hear the creeping hum of trees taking to the flames, one after another.

"Let's go," he whispered, and as one they fled from the grisly sight.

They ran. They ran back towards the camp and freed the screaming horses where they'd wound their tethers around bushes in their panic. Kouei cut the ropes with his knife. Fuuga flung Master Raika's dragon familiar aflight with shaky orders to reach Mount Tenku as swiftly as he could.

That most important thing done, they rode north the way they'd come ahead of the glow of the spreading forest fire. To their luck, they'd crossed the river, one of the widest in the region, only yesterday afternoon.

On the strength of habit formed through years on the move, they watered and rubbed down the foaming horses. She heard Kouei murmur to his bay mare as he worked, the same strings of soothing nothings over and over again. He strode off into the sparse trees as soon as he was done. She watched him go until she could no longer see him.

Then she curled up on her blankets and cried her heart out, inconsolable as a girl at the ending of her world.

She had thought they would be guided. That they'd have the time to gather and prepare. That there'd perhaps be a great battle, the Clans of the Dragons against the black ones.

Today, one of her wards, returned without her memory, entrusted to her, had died barely born.

The dragon familiar would fly for at least three days before even reaching Raika. How was she supposed to bear this weight until then? She knew Kouei looked to her for a level head, just as she did to him to approach a wary tavern-keeper or village elder with light, persuasive words. She couldn't even think beyond stemming her tears.

Near dusk, Kouei came back from the woods, refused food, but let her bandage his bloody knuckles and pick the bits of bark from them. He never looked at her while she worked.

The tent had survived, already bundled on the back of their pack horse. He pitched it in silence. She slipped into the nest of blankets while he took first watch.

The hours of the night chased each other on the long road towards morning. Awake, she listened to the rustle of the horses and the campfire.

After moondown, he came to her, awkward and wide-eyed. She wasn't sure which of them fumbled the other in their arms first.

It was far from the trysts described in the risque court poems she had scoffed at as tripe fitting only for flighty ladies-in-waiting. She knew where Kouei went when he left their shared inn rooms sometimes in the night. This went down a way away from both; desperate and close and bound up in grief so vast she could find no words for it at all.

A downpour came and went, whispering on the roof of the tent like her hands on his arched back. She bit down on his shoulder, shuddering, then let him coax her head back and hear her gasp of his name. Fuuga had lost track of where her legs twined with his and his arms around her ended. The sadness was the same across the boundaries of their bodies, finally loose and calm enough to sleep.

"I never thought it'd be like this," she confessed. "I thought..."

"That we'd just wait. That they'd all know, somehow."

"That he'd be there to guide us." She couldn't see him, merely followed the warm curve of his shoulder until her head was tucked against his throat.

Maybe this was what happened when fate went astray. It had begun inside the Dragon Family, a promise scorned, a marriage cast aside. Had that been right? Did one man's love for a woman, however true, justify the breaking of a promise binding entire kingdoms?

She wanted to say it was none of her concern and could not. She'd been called and stepped forward for love and loyalty for a woman whose face was even now fading in her memory.

"Fuuga?" Kouei said softly, breaking her reverie. "I don't think he saw this."

She sighed, though not in irritation. "But he sent us down this way. What if he knew, and we just..."

_We just failed._

This wasn't a fairytale, of course she knew that, no song or story to teach a moral to rapt-eyed children. She was old enough to have children of her own, sons and daughters blossoming to adulthood any summer now. Instead, she was trapped as a woman of twenty winters, smooth and strong forevermore. Until she had completed her task.

She'd accepted the burden.

Kouei's fingers threaded through her hair. In the close dark, she could smell them both, sweat and skin and fading desire.

A darker thought, then. Raika had told them to go south down the highroad. Had things moved just as he had wished them to move? A shiver caught her breath in her throat.

"We should go back," she said. "I mean, when the forest's passable."

"That's going to take a while."

"We can wait." She willed herself to relax. His nearness seemed to fit, even now that the tears had gone and with them the worst of the shock of grief. "We have time, right?"

"Yeah." A pause. "Sleep, all right?" Kouei wiggled and sat up, and she tumbled across his lap. He found the hem of a blanket somewhere in the dark and drew the quilt over her. "We'll talk to him. Together."

Something warm splashed in the hollow of her chest. She was so used to him on her side on the road, at her back when they were caught in battle.

"Together," she said, and curled closer. Somewhere, a forest burned. Somewhere, a dragon had died, in pain and ignominy, slain and torn by an enemy that would not forgive.

She had sworn to meet the princess, in whatever other life to which she would return. This was not a story. The battle of the dragons, brief and bloody, ending in murder, would not go down in song and memory.

She fumbled until she found Kouei's hand and pulled it to her shoulder, their fingers enmeshed. Slowly she felt her breathing ease and him settle back down. Raising the blanket, she tugged him to her and held on. Her mind spun in broken circles, but here, in each other, there was a spot of safety until the night passed.

In the morning, she would find out just what had changed, and how they might make sense again. For now, she had something to anchor her, a strange sort of mercy.

She slept at last.


End file.
